Changer la prose du monde (Changing the Prose of the World) brings together the projects and works created by the fellows of the Villa Medici during their year of residency in Rome.
Presented in the plurality of the fellows’ native languages, the title of the exhibition is inspired by the first line of a short Italian poem by Amelia Rosselli (1930–1996), whose rhythmic and dissident language disrupts the foundations of normative language and dominant narratives.
Celebrating the diversity of cultures, the multidisciplinary approach and the pluriversal, critical and engaged spirit of this cohort of fellows, the imperative Changing the Prose of the World resonates with the artistic, poetic, political and ecological narratives that underpin their research.
In a collective gesture carried by a diversity of voices, the exhibition takes shape through a variety of artistic practices—from literature to musical creation, art history, visual arts, photography and cinema.
Freed languages spill across the walls and exhibition rooms of the Villa like pages of a book, thanks to a typographic intervention by Montasser Drissi, specially invited for the occasion. The visual narrative of the exhibition is punctuated by literary sentences—chosen, collected or invented by each fellow in response to Rosselli’s words.
This process of random and multilingual writing is the result of a shared breath and mindset among sixteen unique individuals who, for a year, shared the same air and space, never ceasing to reimagine the world and the horizon of possibilities.
Artists: Haig Aivazian, Bianca Bondi, Jérôme Printemps Clément-Wilz, Nicolas Daubanes, Abdessamad El Montassir, Alessandro Gallicchio, Amalia Laurent, Pierre-Yves Macé, Clovis Maillet, Nicolas Sarzeaud, Claudia Jane Scroccaro, Seynabou Sonko, Ana Vaz, Pierre Von-Ow, Lise Wajeman, Louisa Yousfi
